In rehearsal with Zubin Kanga's cyborg piano, and at the art gallery with Julius Eastman's Femenine

The Music Show is live at Canberra International Music Festival on 3 May - come join our audience!

Zubin Kanga is known as the ‘cyborg pianist’, because throughout his career he’s been using technology to expand the idea of what the piano is and what it can do. As part of his major research project, Cyborg Soloists, he has commissioned dozens of experimental works, including one by composer Tristan Coelho. Andy drops in on them both at rehearsal for Ensemble Offspring’s Lumen Machine, where they demonstrate the honeycomb-like Lumatone keyboard and a small but powerful motion-sensor ring that responds to Zubin’s hands on and off the piano.

And as the Earshift Orchestra prepares to perform Julius Eastman’s expansive, ‘organic’ work Femenine, saxophonist and bandleader Jeremy Rose and percussionist Niki Johnson meet Andy in front of Femenine in Nine, a series of paintings by the American artist Julie Mehretu, inspired by Eastman’s work.

Ensemble Offspring’s Lumen Machine is at ACO on the Pier in Sydney on Saturday 12 April and Newcastle Conservatorium of Music on Sunday 13 April. 

The Earshift Orchestra perform Femenine at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney on Thursday 17 April as part of Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory. 

The Music Show is live at Canberra International Music Festival on 3 May - come join our audience!